Fortunately, I’ve got the artist kicking off our countdown to push me forward, and remind me why I took up this six-part (so far) endeavor in the first place. As always, I’ll conclude with a list of some other #2s from the decade.

11. “Work It,” Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott. I don’t particularly care for this track, but there are a couple reasons why it’s a perfect launching pad for this column. For one, it represents a key step in the evolution of hip-hop toward raunchy themes and racy lyrics. Because Missy was as nasty as the boyz of her era, she absolved the trend of any misogynist stigma, and it was a quick step from “Work It” to the strip-club hip-hop soul that’s become so prevalent lately. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily … though when even Jordin Sparks is singing about “the club,” maybe the moment is over, huh? Anyway, the other key accomplishment of “Work It” was its 10-week stay at #2 — tied with Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You” (which we celebrated here) for the longest runner-up run in chart history. And here’s where we’ve gotta give Missy her props, because she’s got the stones to admit that only reaching #2 with her biggest hit kinda sucked. “I just wanted to die those ten weeks,” she said of being blocked by Eminem’s smash “Lose Yourself” through the winter of ’03. “I mean, it wasn’t cool.”

10. (tie) “Apologize,” Timbaland with OneRepublic ; “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race,” Fall Out Boy; “The Reason,” Hoobastank; “In the End,” Linkin Park; “Hanging by a Moment,” Lifehouse; “Photograph,” Nickelback. Here, in descending order of quality (as far as I’m concerned), are six of the seven biggest rock-based hits to cross over to the pop chart this decade without making it all the way to the top. So why have I lumped all these songs together here? Well, considering that you can count the #1 hits that have emerged from the rock idiom since 2002 on the fingers on one hand – depending on how you feel about the crunchy guitars on your standard Kelly Clarkson or Pink single – it just makes sense to confine these singles to their own little ghetto. So, take a quick peek over the wall and then move on … there’s nothing much to see here. (Except to wonder why Timbaland makes himself look so ridiculous in the following video — as if his oversold “hey, heys” from the control room were actually being caught by the mics in the studio.)

9. “Pon de Replay,” Rihanna. The Barbadian spitfire’s first big hit was the dancehall (and aerobics-studio) jam of summer ’05, though it became one of four songs left in the dust by Mariah Carey’s comeback smash “We Belong Together.” Interestingly, another of those four was Mariah’s own follow-up hit, “Shake It Off,” which became only the second single in history to be blocked by another track from the same artist. The first was “Twist and Shout,” which got stuck behind “Can’t Buy Me Love” during the initial wave of Beatlemania. At least the Fabs have an excuse for getting in their own way, as “Twist and Shout” was released on the Vee-Jay label – it was among the early-Beatles songs Capitol Records had rejected when it didn’t believe the group would be successful in the U.S. The phenomenon repeated itself once more in 2006 – sorta – when Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape,” featuring Akon, was blocked by Akon’s own “Don’t Matter.” As for “Pon de Replay,” it was the track from Rihanna’s initial four-song demo that grabbed the ear of then-Def Jam honcho Jay-Z, and the rest is history … including the unfortunate incident you’ll be thinking about while you read my #6 listing below.

8. (tie) “You Belong with Me,” Taylor Swift, and “Party in the USA,” Miley Cyrus. Look, I don’t care what you think – these smashes by America’s sweethearts are my daughter Catie’s favorite songs of the year, and I’ve had them drilled into my skull to the point where I can think of little else. Besides, they’re both nice little tunes, and they’ve both sparked nice little controversies. Everybody knows what happened to poor Taylor at the VMAs, and then there’s the small matter of Miley’s supposed “pole dancing” at the Teen Choice Awards. If you’re like me, you’ve never actually seen what the fuss was all about, so check out the fan video below (I couldn’t find an “official” video anywhere on the Net).

All I can say is, anybody who can get Bill O’Reilly to embarrass himself prattling on about teenagers and values, just because she did a couple of knee bends while standing atop an ice cream cart, is OK by me. So Catie, you can keep watching clips of your “girl songs” at full blast as long as you want; please, though, just wait a few more years before you discover this. (Fun facts: “You Belong with Me” and “Party in the USA” are two of four songs whose artists never quite got to toast “mazel tov” thanks to the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”; the others were “Run This Town” by Jay-Z, Rihanna and Taylor’s tormentor, and “Watcha Say” by Jason DeRulo. All five songs continue to sit in Billboard’s Top 10. “I Gotta Feeling” is tied as the second-longest-running #1 hit in history; even more impressive, its 14-week run at the top immediately followed a 12-week run by the Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow,” giving them the longest stretch at #1 of any act in history.) Anyway, here’s the sweet-as-sugar video for “You Belong with Me,” the Best Female Video of the year. (Suck it, Kanye!)

7. “Complicated,” Avril Lavigne. It’s hard to believe Avril’s debut single didn’t top the Hot 100 – though it’s even harder to believe that its follow-up, “Sk8er Boi,” only made it to #10. “Complicated” was ubiquitous on at least a half-dozen radio formats during the summer of 2002, from Mainstream Top 40 to Hot Adult Contemporary, but crapped out at #2 on the big chart behind a track that dominated several other formats – Nelly’s “Hot in Herre.” Speaking of crapping, “Complicated” inspired one of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s best parodies in years, a song that was my son Jacob’s favorite for entirely too long a while. Al never made a video for it, but fortunately somebody else did … using Legos.

6. (tie) “Forever” and “With You,” Chris Brown. Like millions of other folks, I used to love Chris Brown’s music without a guilty conscience; now, like most of those same millions, I still love the music but feel all torn up about it. I feel especially awful about putting Brown ahead of Rihanna on this list … but, man, these tracks are just killer, aren’t they? “With You” bears too close a resemblance to Beyonce’s smash “Irreplaceable” – though Brown completely got away with it, in no small part because both songs were written and produced by the Stargate crew. Besides, how could anybody complain about hearing those acoustic guitars on two R&B hits in one year? (“With You” also has the distinction of being the only song featuring the word “boo” that I can bear to sit through.) Then there’s “Forever,” which started as a Doublemint gum jingle – a fact that completely escaped my TiVo-enhanced, commercial-free existence at the time, leaving me to wonder why he kept singing, “Double your pleasure, double your fun” — and ended up a YouTube phenomenon for reasons having nothing to do with Brown himself. If you haven’t seen the video in question – or the wedding episode of The Office – here’s your chance to get with the program. Before getting to Brown’s awesome original clip, it’s worth noting that after climbing into the number 2 slot behind Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” “Forever” was leapfrogged by … Rihanna’s “Disturbia.”

5. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” Green Day. Back at #9 I listed six rock-based hits to peak in the runner-up slot during the decade. Well, here’s the seventh – though its chord progression more properly belongs in a treatise on rock hits of the ’90s, along with the rest of Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” That fact wasn’t lost on mash-up master Party Ben, who blended the two songs (along with Aerosmith’s “Dream On” and Travis’ “Writing to Reach You”) on “Boulevard of Broken Songs,” a centerpiece of his internet-only American Edit album. Beyond that, Green Day’s hit was easily the biggest of their career, and spent four months atop both Billboard’s Mainstream Rock and Modern Rock charts. (Unbelievably, “American Idiot” had peaked at a paltry #61 on the Hot 100.) “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was named Record of the Year at the 2006 Grammys, in a vote that was widely considered a corrective measure for American Idiot failing to win Album of the Year the year before. The song’s video, meanwhile, cleaned up at the MTV awards in ’05, taking six moon men including Video of the Year. Suck it again, Kanye! (He was nominated for “Jesus Walks.”)

4. “Heartless,” Kanye West. Yeah, yeah, I know … You can trash Kanye’s arrogance and poor timing all you want, but you can’t deny the skillz. He samples the Alan Parsons Project here, for crying out loud! Like the next song featured in this column, “Heartless” has been covered to great effect by white acts a couple times already, in ways that don’t at all resemble Pat Boone-style abominations. Its video, with rotoscoped animation (and the Jetsons too!), is pretty kick-ass as well – though not good enough to score any nominations at this year’s MTV awards, much less any trophies. And the single got stuck at #2 last winter behind Beyonce’s “Single Ladies,” which went on to win Video of the Year. Suck it, Kanye!

3. “Crazy,” Gnarls Barkley. What makes me crazy is that this song didn’t reach #1. And what were the earth-shattering singles that blocked it from the top of the chart during the summer of ’06? Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous” (not terrible, but come on) and Fergie’s … fricking … “London Bridge.” (What’s “going down” is Western civilization.) Well, whatever – those two songs are pretty much forgotten already, while “Crazy” will live on in a million cover versions as well as the Gnarls’ already-classic original. (Of course, “original” is a relative term – the bassline is ripped off from a spaghetti-Western soundtrack tune called “Nel Cimitero di Tucson.” ) Seriously, though, has any song since “Yesterday” sparked the flood of covers that this song has? The Raconteurs, Paolo Nutini and the Twilight Singers have rocked it up; Ray LaMontagne, Shawn Colvin, Brandi Carlile and Furtado herself have slowed it down. Of Montreal, Mates of State and Butch Walker have put indie spins on it, and then there’s this guy with a theremin.

2. “Since U Been Gone,” Kelly Clarkson. Most of my Popdose colleagues rate “Crazy” above “Since U Been Gone” – I know this for a fact, and so will the rest of you in about a month – but, to me, Clarkson’s was the decade’s perfect pop single. (OK, not quite perfect – maybe she could have constrained the banshee wailing on the bridge – but still…) It spent nine months in the Top 40, five in the Top 10, but stalled at #2 in the spring of 2005 behind 50 Cent’s inane, sexed-up “Candy Shop” – which had already thrown up a roadblock for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” a couple weeks earlier. Five years later, though, Clarkson and Green Day continue to ride high on the charts, while 50 Cent has pushed back the release of his new album at least half a dozen times. Suck it, Fiddy!

Once more, for argument’s sake, here are some other #2 hits of the decade, along with the songs that held them back from the pinnacle: “Breathe,” Faith Hill (Santana’s “Maria Maria”); “Survivor,” Destiny’s Child (Janet Jackson’s “All for You”); “Hit ’Em Up Style,” Blu Cantrell (Usher’s “U Remind Me”); “Without Me,” Eminem (Nelly’s “Hot in Herre”); “Beautiful,” Christina Aguilera (B2K & P Diddy’s “Bump, Bump, Bump”); “Flying Without Wings,” Ruben Studdard (Clay Aiken’s “This Is the Night”); “Right Thurr,” Chingy (Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love”); “Turn Me On,” Norah Jones (Outkast’s “Hey Ya”); “Don’t Cha,” Pussycat Dolls (Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together”); “Fergalicious,” Fergie (Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable”); “The Sweet Escape,” Gwen Stefani featuring Akon (Akon’s own “Don’t Matter”); and “Because of You,” Ne-Yo (Maroon 5’s “Makes Me Wonder”).

I’ll wrap up this series in a few weeks with a rundown of #2 hits from throughout the rock era that may as well have peaked at #99, for all we remember about them. Roy Head’s “Treat Her Right” or the Poppy Family’s “Which Way You Goin’ Billy,” anybody? Anybody?

Sometimes I wonder if kids today are bothered in the slightest by the sorts of things that used to freak me out when I was a boy. For example, when I was 9 I spent several months in what I now refer to as my “Hitler phase,” when – fueled by the Nazi-horror stories imparted by a creepy friend, and spooked by a coffee-table book called Sieg Heil! that I had checked out from the local library — I frequently conjured the very real image of Der Führer lurking behind my darkened bedroom door. (He didn’t have to hold a machete – the thought of that moustache alone was enough to make me wet myself.) Those months were probably the only time I was thankful to share a room with my older brother, because I couldn’t stand to be in the dark by myself. I often found myself running at a full sprint to the front of the house to escape Adolf’s clutches, and those were the days when my mom would stomp through the house, snapping off lights I had left on and muttering something about owning the electric company.

At about that same time, during the fall of 1975, my friend Kevin brought over a single he had snatched from his sister’s collection. We knew it simply as “The Exorcist,” but of course it was an edited version of the “first movement” (A/K/A side one) of Mike Oldfield’s debut LP Tubular Bells, excerpted for use as the theme to William Friedkin’s film version of William Peter Blatty’s religious-horror novel. The single, officially known as “Tubular Bells (Theme from The Exorcist),” had reached the Top 10 almost two years before, but its success had predated by just a few months my headlong leap into pop-radio obsession during the fall of ’74. And as a 9-year-old, I wasn’t yet familiar with the R-rated film.

I was, however, intimately familiar with the novel. I don’t know why my parents had allowed me to get my hands on Sieg Heil! or The Exorcist or Jaws (which I devoured that fall even as the film continued its 8-month-long run in a local theater) – maybe everything was fair game for a pair of atheist liberals in the post-Watergate era. Suffice it to say that my first real exposure to Catholicism (apart from a couple of masses attended with my aunt and uncle) involved copious amounts of poor Regan’s vomit and a crucifix inserted where no crucifix should ever go. The impact of reading The Exorcist at nine probably explains a lot about the dysfunctional functioning of my psyche ever since, not least my tendency whenever an electrical gadget refuses to work properly to proclaim, a la Dr. Evil when his chair won’t stop spinning around, “I need an old priest and a young priest.”

Even with all of that going on, it wasn’t actually the A-side of the “Tubular Bells” single that set me off when Kevin played it for me — it was the flipside, which excerpted the closing portion of the album’s “first movement.” (By the way, wasn’t it entirely more satisfying to flip over a 45 and discover a cool song, as opposed to merely checking out the second track of a CD single or downloading an extra file?) “Tubular Bells (long version)” started out ominously enough, with a couple repetitions of the percolating guitar line that would underscore the entire track.

Soon enough, a formal, bordering-on-snooty British voice intones the words “grand piano,” and a melody is introduced atop that persistent guitar.

As the melody line concludes, the voice returns (innocuously enough) to say “reed and pipe organ,” and the melody repeats, and a pattern is established … a not-unpleasant pattern, really, though that guitar still offers cause for concern. Then the voice comes in again, this time a bit more disturbingly.

“Glockenspiel? What the hell’s a glockenspiel?” said the other voice, the one inside my prepubescent head. “Is that some sort of Nazi torture device?” Yet the pattern continues … relentlessly, and with growing momentum … the melody repeated by a bass guitar, a double-speed guitar, two slightly distorted guitars, and then …

Why did he have to say “mandolin” that way?!? As though it was the last instrument I’d hear before Hitler emerged from my closet? (Once my college girlfriend had heard this story, all she ever had to do to make fun of me was bug her eyes and say, “mahn-doh-LIN!”) The mandolin itself is spooky enough – high-pitched, quickly strummed, and with the other instruments building behind it. Building, building, through one more cycle featuring Spanish and acoustic guitars, and then finally comes the voice one more time, this time sounding like either Hitler or the devil himself: “plus, tubular … bells!”

As soon as that monstrous bell clanged for the first time, I was screaming, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” But Kevin wouldn’t turn it off, and I was forced to sit through the clanging … through the choir that may as well be angels of death … through that melody that I never wanted to hear again, and yet knew I’d be hearing in my head for the rest of my life.

Even as “Tubular Bells” inevitably became the soundtrack of my Hitler phase, the melody that sent me sprinting toward the light of the living room as surely as “Chariots of Fire” would later propel Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, I became obsessed with listening to it again and again. Perhaps, I kidded myself, if I heard it enough times it would lose its ability to frighten me, and I could conquer my pathetic fear of a pop song.

It didn’t work, of course – and worse, Kevin and my brother Kit both knew it wasn’t working. Finally I banished the single from our house, telling Kevin I never wanted to hear it again and borrowing some other record of his that I can no longer remember – the Carpenters’ “Solitaire,” perhaps, or maybe “Fly Robin Fly.” This seemed to calm my nerves a bit, and soon I began to feel more confident in darkened hallways. But then, a couple of nights later, I was going to bed after a typical evening spent listening to my small collection of 45s, and my brother said, “You want me to play one more?”

“Sure,” I replied, and he set the needle down on a 45 – then walked to the door, cut off the overhead light and left, locking me inside … with “Tubular Bells” playing at full blast. That communist (which is what I called him when I was mad at him in those days) had borrowed the record back from Kevin, just so he could pull this awful stunt. I don’t know how many toys I stepped on, how many pieces of furniture I reduced to rubble, as I bolted from my bed and lunged for the door in complete darkness, screaming bloody murder while Kit held the doorknob on the outside so I couldn’t turn it. And when my dad arrived to bring down the hammer (which is pretty much what he was there for in those days), I could tell that even as he was figuring out a punishment for my brother he couldn’t hide the fact that he was … laughing at me.

Now I know why, of course. Now I know that the voice on the record isn’t Mephistopheles but rather Vivian Stanshall, former vocalist for the Bonzo Dog Band, and that his affect was supposed to be comical rather than nasty. (When Oldfield remade Tubular Bells a few years back in an effort to revive his sales numbers, he hired John Cleese to step in for the dearly departed Mr. Stanshall.) Now I know that the fascinating, haunting, but overly long Tubular Bells was pretty much the last stop for the hybrid classical/prog-rock instrumental genre before it morphed into New Age (and stopped frightening anybody). And now I know that the devil isn’t going to possess me via a pop song, no matter how menacing it is, and that Hitler isn’t going to leap out from behind every closed door.

Still, now I’m starting to think that maybe I shouldn’t have reminded myself of all this childhood trauma. And I’m thinking that you’ll have to forgive me if, over the next few days, I quicken my step a little bit when I traverse a darkened corridor.

Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells, first movement

This weekend Entertainment Weekly came out with a vaguely interesting, vaguely infuriating list of the Fabs’ “50 best songs,” selected (it seems) by a panel of 10 EW writers (including that other, probably better-paid but infinitely less worthy Jeff Giles). The magazine’s crew did such a lousy job separating the Strawberry Fields from the Norwegian Wood that I figured, I can do better than that … heck, I’ll bet we all can!

And so here we are. Several of my Popdose colleagues have contributed their own lists, but this is no Popdose 100 – we weren’t organized enough this time to compile a comprehensive survey of our Beatle tastes. Still, there are a few generalizations to be reached, particularly on the popularity of such tracks as “A Day in the Life,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Revolution,” and the Abbey Road medley. Please feel free – no, feel compelled – to offer your own best-of list in the comments, or at least to take potshots at ours. Me first, though (with each song’s EW ranking, if any, in parentheses):

1. A Day in the Life (#2 on the EW list). Here is the consummate track of the Beatles’ studio era, replete with John’s wisdom, Paul’s whimsy, George Martin’s knob-twirling prowess, a touch of self-reference, a great recording-session story, the seeds of “Paul is Dead” … and the Biggest Piano Chord in History.
2. Revolution (#21). Personally, I’ll take the “slow” version off The White Album, with its groovy backing vocals and John’s extra splash of ambivalence (“Don’t you know that you can count me out … in”). Fast or slow, John’s simultaneous encouragement and admonition to the counterculture, released (on the flip of “Hey Jude”) right in the middle of the riots at the ’68 Democratic Convention, could not have been better timed. Certain over-the-top protesters at our current moment could stand to heed its message.
3. Here, There and Everywhere (not on the EW list!). Forget about “Yesterday” or “And I Love Her” or even “Blackbird.” (Well, don’t forget them entirely…) This is the prettiest melody Paul ever wrote, and its lyric, while gimmicky, is exquisitely designed and brilliantly sung.
4. Here Comes the Sun (#48). The conventional wisdom has “Something” as George’s best Beatle song, maybe because it topped the chart and because Sinatra liked it. But I’ll take the pristine, acoustic “Here Comes the Sun” every time.
5. Ticket to Ride (#46). This single forcefully announced that, as far as the group was concerned, Beatlemania was over and it was time to Get Serious. It may be Ringo’s greatest recorded moment.
6. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (#9). John’s extramarital tomfoolery brilliantly distilled into 2:06 of hints, mystery and a dose of rudimentary sitar.
7. Rain (#28). A track full of psychedelic studio trickery, but a song that would have stood out in any Beatles era.
8. We Can Work It Out (#23). Half of the Greatest Two-Sided Single in History, along with…
9. Day Tripper (#41). All the evidence necessary that John was one of rock’s greatest singers.
10. I Am the Walrus (#32). Stomps all over “Come Together” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Glass Onion” as the best of John’s Lewis-Carroll-on-LSD nonsense songs.
11. Things We Said Today (not on EW’s list!).
12. Across the Universe (#10).
13. Blackbird (#18).
14. Strawberry Fields Forever (#4).
15. A Hard Day’s Night (#1).
16. You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away (#17).
17. Back in the U.S.S.R. (N/A).
18. And Your Bird Can Sing (N/A).
19. Let It Be (#7).
20. I Will (N/A).
21. I’m So Tired (#49).
22. If I Fell (#22!).
23. Penny Lane (#12).
24. Tomorrow Never Knows (#8).
25. Please Please Me (N/A).
26. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (N/A!).
27. Paperback Writer (#26).
28. She Said She Said (#37.)
29. Help! (#13).
30. Helter Skelter (#47).
31. Two of Us (N/A).
32. Birthday (N/A).
33. She Loves You (#6).
34. In My Life (#15).
35. With a Little Help from My Friends (#40).
36. I Feel Fine (N/A).
37. Got To Get You Into My Life (N/A).
38. Don’t Let Me Down (N/A).
39. I Want to Tell You (N/A).
40. I’m Only Sleeping (#24).
41. Julia (N/A).
42. Something (#5).
43. I’ve Just Seen a Face (N/A).
44. Dr. Robert (N/A).
45. Hey Jude (#14).
46. I’ve Got a Feeling (#34).
47. Lady Madonna (N/A).
48. I Should Have Known Better (#33).
49. Getting Better (N/A).
50. Yesterday (#3). This song’s enduring reputation is based in large part on the 5 million covers that have been recorded to date — but I’d guess that half of them were done by Easy Listening acts looking to score some reflected street cred from the one “rock” song they could stand. It’s true that “Yesterday” made the Beatles acceptable, for the first time, to the boomers’ parents. But is that supposed to be a positive?

Among the EW-approved songs I left off my list, the most blasphemic exclusions probably are “Eleanor Rigby,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Nowhere Man,” and “Come Together.” Meanwhile, EW didn’t even get its list of the five least Fab tracks right, mucking it up with the throwaways “Wild Honey Pie” and “Dig It” and the instrumental “Flying.” C’mon, you Time Warner elitists — have some balls! I’m down with their inclusion of “All You Need is Love,” but (leaving off “Revolution 9,” which nobody ever sits through anyway) I’d add “Hello Goodbye,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Run for Your Life” and the single worst Beatles song of all time, “Mr. Moonlight.” (I know it’s a cover, but if it wastes 2½ minutes of my time on Beatles for Sale (which is easily the least of all Beatle albums, to begin with), it counts.

ROB SMITH
1. Two of Us. Lennon and McCartney had a marriage, for all intents and purposes, and this is one of the great relationship songs either of them came up with while the group was still together.
2. Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey. John was capable of making the most ridiculous word drool sound profound.
3. Yesterday. Of course, we’ve all heard it a million times. I’ve long wondered, though, what it must have been like to have been a teenage music lover in 1965, stumbling upon this song on the radio for the first time.
4. Abbey Road side-two medley. “Cheater!” some might say. OK, there are, what, 16 mini-songs here? You can’t really listen to one without hearing them all, and the breadth of material (not to mention the connective tissue that holds it all together) is truly mind-blowing.
5. Hey Jude. I’m a sucker for dynamics, and the soft-to-loud shift in this one gets me every time. My dad and I have a long-running debate about the extended outro—I think it’s genius; he just hears a bunch of hippies “na-na-na”-ing.
6. Got To Get You Into My Life. The horns are impeccable—they just blast you out of your seat. McCartney’s half-sung/half-screamed chorus is equally rattling.
7. The Long and Winding Road. According to my mom, this was playing in the hospital the day I was born. It was our mother/son dance at my wedding. I prefer the un-Spectorized version from Let It Be … Naked — it enables one to focus more on the words than the silly choir in the background of the original.
8. Here Comes the Sun. Has any album ever started its second side with a better song?
9. Real Love. The Anthology episodes aired in late November of 1995, the week I got married, so my association with this song (as well as “Free As a Bird”) is strong. Of the two “new” Beatles tracks unveiled that week, this one strikes me as being more Beatlesque.
10. She’s Leaving Home. The first Beatles song I ever really fell in love with, heard for the first time on the brown-covered Love Songs double album my parents bought in the ’70s.

DW. DUNPHY
1. While My Guitar Gently Weeps. It might as well have been George’s goodbye to the band — this song has power behind it. It’s the sound of someone who can leave home now. Oh, and it kinda rocks, too.
2. No Reply. Simple, direct, but the shift from verse to chorus is the prototype for the whole power-pop movement.
3. For No One. Elegant, baroque and utterly memorable.
4. A Day In The Life. The mini-epic, the widescreen equivalent of a pop song.
5. Oh! Darling. I remember my brother, an avowed Beatle basher, staring astonished at the tape deck: “That’s McCartney?!”
6. Let It Be. An absolute lifesaver when I was a young tyke in Parochial school. How that and Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken” slipped through the noose of the advisory board, I’ll never know.
7. Something. There are few pure love songs. This is one of them.
8. You Won’t See Me. It’s got a great groove, does it not?
9. You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away. Lennon gets all Dylan on us, but the nice thing about the Beatles was how they absorbed their influences and came back with something worthy of comparison.
10. Revolution (single version). During this time, I assume it was necessary to remind that after the orchestra swelling, Hindu chasing, wife swapping, in-fighting and hippie dipping, the Beatles were a kick-ass little rock and roll band. With that opening riff and that howl, and Lennon’s
assertive voice thereafter, the message was clear: Yeah, we still do that, too.

JEFF GILES
1. Penny Lane. “Penny Lane” at #1? Well, yeah — today, anyway, because just a couple of mornings ago, I listened to the remastered version, and let me tell you, people…hearing the brass and woodwinds swell around the 2:20 mark is as close to a religious experience as I’ll probably ever come.
2. Two of Us. Rock’s original bromance falls apart, and the sound is typically, heartbreakingly lovely.
3. Here Comes the Sun. Is it possible to listen to this and not be pissed at John and Paul for pooh-poohing George’s songwriting all those years?
4. Hey Jude. A hackneyed choice, sure. But I’ll always have a soft spot for this song, because of the story I relayed here.
5. Blackbird. Civil rights anthem or just plain beautiful ballad? How about both? This is one I can listen to all day.
6. Oh! Darling. Half boozy English blues, half aggro rocker, this song doesn’t say much — but it says it with so much style. Plus, it’s a bitch to sing. Go on, try it.
7. The Long and Winding Road. Nobody writes a “B” section like McCartney, and this song’s is so painfully beautiful that listening to it is enough to make me forgive him for “Freedom.” I can take the “naked” version or the original, depending on my mood.
8. Across the Universe. I went through my “John the Genius” phase, but I’m such a sucker for melody — and John ended up being such a lazy jerk — that I’ve since come around to a more pro-Paul position, as reflected by my McCartney-heavy list. But I can’t argue with poetry like this. Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup / They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe…
9. All You Need Is Love. The ideals of a generation, summed up in a perfect throwaway pop song.
10. Lady Madonna. An irresistibly insistent piano melody, heavenly harmonies, brass, and handclaps — all in under 2:30. God bless ‘em.
11. We Can Work It Out. In the end, of course, they couldn’t work it out…but it’s hard to listen to the tender optimism of this song without being moved.
12. Good Day Sunshine. Nestled between Revolver’s more experimental numbers, a lovely, cheery little pop stroll.
13. She Said She Said. I normally don’t have a lot of patience for the Beatles’ “sitar period,” but this is about the smoothest synthesis of pop and psychedelia you could ask for.
14. I’ll Follow the Sun. One of the only pre-Rubber Soul Beatles tracks that moves me. I tend to lump all their early stuff into the same dopey boat, but “I’ll Follow the Sun” reminds me that they were always more than that.
15. I Will. A perfectly simple, perfectly wonderful love song. Shorter than two minutes long, it took McCartney more than 65 takes to get it right, which should tell you everything you need to know about why the band’s songs are still so timeless.

BEN WISER
1. Abbey Road side-two medley
2. In My Life
3. Rain
4. Tomorrow Never Knows
5. A Day in the Life
6. Eleanor Rigby
7. I’m a Loser
8. If You’ve Got Trouble
9. Can’t Buy Me Love
10. Julia
11. A Hard Day’s Night
12. The Ballad of John and Yoko
13. Something
14. Dear Prudence
15. Things We Said Today
16. Love You To
17. And Your Bird Can Sing
18. I’m Only Sleeping
19. Yer Blues
20. Don’t Pass Me By
21. She’s Leaving Home
22. Cry Baby Cry
23. Fool on the Hill
24. I’ve Got a Feeling
25. It’s All Too Much
26. Love You To
27. Taxman
28. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
29. Let it Be
30. Kansas City

SCOTT MALCHUS
1. Ticket to Ride
2. Here Comes the Sun
3. I Saw Her Standing There
4. Two of Us
5. With a Little Help from My Friends
6. Norweigan Wood
7. She Loves You
8. The Word
9. Get Back
10. A Hard Day’s Night

KEN SHANE
1. Strawberry Fields Forever
2. A Day In the Life
3. Tomorrow Never Knows
4. Abbey Road side-two medley
5. I Me Mine
6. I Should Have Known Better
7. Things We Said Today
8. I Need You
9. No Reply
10. Ticket To Ride
11. If I Fell
12. Girl
13. For No One
14. Dear Prudence
15. Julia
16. Long, Long, Long
17. The Long and Winding Road
18. Paperback Writer
19. I’ll Be Back
20. Rain
21. Across the Universe
22. All You Need Is Love
23. Penny Lane
24. Hey Jude
25. Day Tripper

MIKE HEYLIGER
1. Two of Us
2. Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End
3. A Day in the Life
4. Here Comes the Sun
5. Don’t Let Me Down
6. Helter Skelter (an air-drums classic)
7. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
8. Yesterday
9. Birthday
10. Taxman
11. Eleanor Rigby
12. Got to Get You Into My Life
13. She Said She Said
14. Revolution (single version)
15. The Long and Winding Road
16. Get Back
17. You Won’t See Me
18. Can’t Buy Me Love
19. Hello Goodbye
20. Hey Bulldog

Among the more detailed histories, Michael Lang – one of the co-creators of Woodstock Ventures and a real force behind the festival – has penned The Road to Woodstock, which includes other organizers’ remembrances as well as his own. Then there’s Taking Woodstock, the book behind the film opening this weekend; its author, Elliot Tiber, has a somewhat more tenuous connection to the proceedings – he happened to have the authority to issue event permits in Bethel, NY, when Lang and his cohorts needed to find a new location for the festival at the 11th hour. Meanwhile, Woodstock Revisited makes no claims to officialdom – it’s simply 50 brief oral histories by 50 festival attendees.

Perhaps the most comprehensive, and the most absorbing, of all these is Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock by Pete Fornatale. The author is a long-serving New York DJ who happened to debut on WNEW-FM just three weeks before Woodstock, and spent the next several years chatting up festival organizers, artists and other participants. (Fornatale now hosts a show on the wonderful WFUV-FM.) The history he’s created weaves Woodstock’s tale moment by moment, artist by artist, achieving at many points a Rashomon-like tapestry of conflicting narratives and opposing attitudes (toward rabble-rousing yippie Abbie Hoffman, for example, who generally made a nuisance of himself before getting a guitar in the neck from an annoyed Pete Townsend).

Popdose spoke with Fornatale last week, as Woodstock-at-40 interest (on the bookshelves, at least) was nearing its peak.

Let me start out by playing devil’s advocate for a minute, because there’s unquestionably a strong current of boomer resentment among people who are my age and younger. Would you say this 40th anniversary might be the last big chance to remember Woodstock, because once the boomers get much older there won’t be that many people who still hold the legend in such regard?
You know, I’ve thought about this for a long time, both while doing the book and while I was doing the interviews that appear in it. And I honestly think that’s not the case. In 50 years – if there’s still a world in 50 years – people are still going to be interested in what happened during that weekend, how it happened, and why it mattered.

This 40th anniversary is getting so much attention for three reasons, as best I can tell. The first is curiosity: Young people who missed the festival by an accident of birth have become enamored of this music, these artists and that event. Fortunately, in our media-saturated world it’s possible to vicariously experience the event, and I believe that interest will continue even after the last living survivor of Woodstock is gone. The second is nostalgia: If a member of Woodstock Nation wants to spend a weekend engrossed in reliving that less responsible time in their lives, that’s a good thing. And the third is mortality: The age of the typical Woodstock attendee was between 15 to 30, and believe me, you look at life a lot differently in your 60s and 70s. If Woodstock, like it did for so many people of this generation, etched its message of peace, love and music in your soul, then you want to hang onto it as you head into the dustbin of eternity.

I’m struck by the collision of so many first-person accounts in your book, and the way it removes the consensus from the story of the event. Even the documentary, which has always seemed so exhaustive, clearly doesn’t tell the whole story.
I agree with that. I had a very similar response when we were compiling the book, and we found we had collected eight different stories as to how Max Yasgur came to be involved, and became this hero of the event. Woodstock has moved from reality to mythology, so it no longer matters how many nails were used to build the stage, or how much the artists were paid. It’s about the memories of the people who lived the experience, and who lived it vicariously. You know, there were the people who were at the festival itself, but then there’s a much larger cross-section of that generation who had the opportunity to become members of Woodstock Nation without having to sit in the mud, but with all the popcorn they could eat in the movie theater. Their stories matter now, too.

What’s your best guess as to how many people were actually at Woodstock? The crowd count that’s passed into legend is Joni Mitchell’s “half a million strong,” but by page 6 of your book I had already read at least a half-dozen estimates — from the police saying that Woodstock Ventures estimated it at 170,000 by Saturday afternoon, to the New York Times’ contemporaneous guess of 300,000, to festival production manager John Morris saying it was 600,000 or 700,000.
In my own head I accept the number of 450,000 at the actual event. Of course, there’s no way to estimate the number of people who were turned away or scared off by the traffic backups. I imagine that, one day, Google will figure out a way to take one of the existing pictures of the crowd on that hillside and count them off, head by head.

Tell me about the process of collecting these oral histories.
You know, everyone in the world passed through WNEW when I was there, which is why I got a head start collecting these remembrances of the Woodstock experiences. It was my son who came up with the idea of doing this book — he and I had collaborated on a Simon & Garfunkel history a couple years ago, and when we were done I asked, “So, what’s next?” And he said, “How about a history of Woodstock for the 40th anniversary?” And I said, “My God, I’ve got half of it done already.”

I had been collecting first-person accounts from that first year straight through. I’m a pack rat, so I had all these old tapes sitting around, but we soon discovered that reel-to-reel tapes from that era don’t play that well anymore — the adhesive falls off and the coated side separates, and you wind up with all sorts of distortion and peeling. I was panicked about that, but it turns out there’s a method of baking a reel-to-reel tape that reattaches the adhesive, and gives you a relatively short window of time to play the tapes and digitize the material.

Were there aspects of the story that you found yourself needing to fill in with contemporary interviews?
Absolutely! At places where we found holes in the story, we went out and found people who could fill in the gaps. For the Jimi Hendrix chapter I went to a friend, the singer Kenny Rankin, who was backstage while Jimi was playing. Jimi’s band for that day wasn’t the Experience or Band of Gypsies – it was an amalgam, and one of the musicians was a percussionist named Gerardo Velez who had grown up with Kenny. So Kenny got a backstage pass and got to jam with the master, so to speak. I knew the story and knew it would be perfect for the book, so we did the interview by phone late last year. Then, just a couple months ago on June 8, I was heading to an event in the city and checked this bulletin board at the station that I always look at for news — and there was a message that said, “Kenny Rankin, RIP.”

Did you find discrepancies, in fact or just in tone, between the stories you collected many years ago and the more contemporary remembrances?
The way I reference it in the book, in relation to the Max Yasgur stories, is, “You might want to hold your head together with both your hands so it doesn’t explode.” You have to sift your way through the evidence, and hope that the truth emerges. For example, the legend quickly grew about babies being born at Woodstock – even Walter Cronkite’s report [during a year-end CBS special in 1969] mentions it as a fact. But there’s no concrete evidence of a Woodstock baby, no records of a birth having happened during the festival. Don’t you think that baby would have its own reality show by now? So, anything we couldn’t verify, we didn’t put in, because I didn’t want to add to anything to the story unless I knew it was true.

We got some very candid stories [during the more recent interviews]. One of the most interesting came from John Sebastian. He wasn’t even supposed to perform at Woodstock – he went there as a spectator [but was pressed into service on the first day, with a borrowed guitar and, as he puts it, “a slight buzz”]. I interviewed him about his appearance, and he said he felt he had done himself a great disservice by allowing himself to be talked into performing when he was not going to be his best.

What are some of your other favorite stories? One of mine is Country Joe McDonald’s attempts to find some way to avoid going onstage by himself on Friday – before he electrified the crowd with his “Gimme an F!” cheer. And another is Melanie’s astonishment at the idea that she was going to have to play in front of the crowd she saw from the helicopter.
She was so nervous that she got a psychosomatic cough! Joan Baez wound up bringing her some tea. That’s quite a lovely story. Another great Joan story is that there was a smaller second stage at the festival, where lesser-known artists were performing. Joan, who was six months pregnant, made it over to that stage and then stood patiently in line behind the other acts who were waiting to perform. And she wound up doing a performance on that little stage, and finally her manager had to pull her back so she could do what she was supposed to be doing.

Also, I had never heard the electrocution story. They had put electrical wiring in the ground, underneath the area where the crowd was going to be, and as long as the ground was dry everybody thought it was far enough underground to not be a problem. But after all that rain turned the hillside into a giant mud pit, somebody said, “If we don’t do something to move this wire, this is going to be the biggest mass-electrocution in history.”

That makes me think about the other logistical problems – particularly the traffic issues. In the book, several of the festival organizers claim they had an airtight plan for the traffic coming toward the festival site, and blamed the mess on the fact that the New York cops they had hired to direct it were pulled back. It’s hard for me to believe they had such a great plan, considering the way things turned out.
I think all of that had to do with the fact that nobody knew how big the festival was going to be until that Friday, when so many people had already shown up. They were so overwhelmed by it all, so in over their heads, that anything they had thought was going to happen had to be thrown to the wind. In the end, the whole weekend was based on improvisation. You know, when they got thrown out of the original site and had to go to Bethel at the last minute, they had to make decisions like whether to make sure the stage got completely built or whether to build strong fences and a box office. They chose to focus on the stage, and the effect of that was that it became a free concert.

All the parties involved were overwhelmed by the massiveness of it, which makes it even more amazing that it didn’t turn into a bloodbath or a disaster of some sort.

I have to say that I’ve always questioned the legend that grew up around the audience at Woodstock, and their ability to coexist in those numbers and under those conditions. On the one hand, I’m sure there was a general amazement at what was going on, and a desire to get through the rain and mud and lack of food and water with a sense of togetherness. But then I think, most of that crowd must have been from the New York City area – and I’ve lived there, and I know how New Yorkers deal with the little inconveniences, and I can’t imagine there could have been all that much peace and love.
Well, maybe the drugs had something to do with it. (laughs) It was the same for the Summer of Love and for Woodstock – the conditions were terrible much of the time, but people came away with memories of an incredibly positive experience. I’ve tried over the years to explain this to myself, and to explain it to others. But I think the best explanation I have come across is [philosopher] Joseph Campbell’s idea, which I quote in the book, that people aren’t so much looking for the meaning of life, but are looking to “feel the rapture of being alive.” And I think that’s what Woodstock gave them.

You know, when Woodstock came along it created — the term wasn’t fashionable at the time, but it really was a “perfect storm.” It was the culmination of the climate of the ’60s, the response of young people to the war, and all the rest of it. It was also the emergence of this grown-up kind of rock ‘n’ roll — not ’50s rock, but a post-Beatles leap in the seriousness of rock ‘n’ roll. And this was a group of people, the boomers, who knew they were different from the generations that came before them, but they didn’t recognize how many of them there were, or how like-minded they were. Woodstock turned out to be a coming-out party for a generation.

That’s a common theme – but when you look at the timeline of it all, wasn’t Woodstock closer to the end than the beginning? I mean, Altamont was only a few months later, and that really took a lot of air out of the balloon. And within a year of Woodstock Jimi and Janis were dead, Kent State had happened, and already the boomers were starting to look at the world a lot differently.
There’s no question about that. The book doesn’t shrink from the dark side of it all — the drugs were obviously already becoming a problem for people like [folksinger] Tim Hardin, who was in terrible shape when he performed at the festival.

One of the paradoxes about Woodstock was that the seeds of its own destruction were planted during the festival. Within a few weeks there were “Woodstock laws” in place that forbade gatherings of that size unless there was adequate access to water, food and sanitary facilities. And a lot of lessons were learned from Woodstock, both the festival and the film that followed it – lessons about how to make sure events like it in the future would be money-making ventures. So we’ve watched as all sorts of mechanisms, from overpriced concessions to T-shirt and souvenir sales, have been put in place to make sure these festivals turn a profit. And if you look at all the festivals that came along after Woodstock – including, certainly, the 1994 and 1999 Woodstock sequel festivals – they don’t come close to the same spirit that was created that weekend.

For that reason, it’s easy to get caught up in the legend. It’s a good legend. One of my favorite quotes about Woodstock came from Roger Ebert, of all people, who reviewed the documentary when he was a young critic. Let me quote him directly: “Years from now, when our generation is attacked for being just as uptight as all the rest of the generations, it will be good to have this movie around to show that, just for a weekend anyway, that wasn’t altogether the case.”

To put it simply, the Billboard Hot 100 charts of that decade were messed up. (I put it somewhat less than simply in a long-winded column last year.) The pop radio format split in two, resulting in charts that rarely reflected anybody’s actual listening experience. Major labels stopped manufacturing singles for many artists (mostly white ones) in an effort to sell more albums, which resulted in huge radio hits that never qualified for the Hot 100. The advent of precise technology for measuring retail sales and radio airplay resulted in singles topping the charts and staying … and staying … and staying. And as I discussed last week, superstars like Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Boyz II Men were so desperate to top the charts, and keep up with the competition, that they conspired with their labels to withhold the retail releases of their new singles until the songs peaked at radio, then flooded the marketplace with discounted product to ensure #1 chart debuts.

As a result of these and other, more random developments, the #2 singles of the ’90s were a fascinating bunch. There were huge hits that were simply blocked by huger ones, and great songs that stalled behind ones whose popularity now leaves us scratching our heads. There were oldies that re-emerged after decades, and the two longest-running chart hits of all time (for the moment). So away we go – and, as always, at the end of the column I’ll list some additional singles that were stranded at third base so we can argue which ones most deserved to score.

11. (tie) “Right Here, Right Now,” Jesus Jones; “P.A.S.S.I.O.N.,” Rhythm Syndicate; “Every Heartbeat,” Amy Grant; “It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over,” Lenny Kravitz; and “Fading Like a Flower (Every Time You Leave),” Roxette. What do these wildly disparate singles have in common? They all were blocked from the top spot during the summer of ’91 by the same song, Bryan Adams’ treacly Robin Hood anthem “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.” (It was the first of three Adams soundtrack singles – all of them god-awful, in my opinion – to top the charts during the ’90s.) Adams spent seven weeks at #1 while holding off five different competitors – the highest number of second-place finishers thwarted by the same single since Percy Faith’s “Theme from A Summer Place” was #1 in 1960. The only one of the five to earn a second week at #2 was – surprise – “P.A.S.S.I.O.N.” In honor of that fact – and because its video is the only one of the five to feature fire (fire! fire!), scantily clad dancers and an atrocious white-boy rap — I’m happy to showcase it here.

10. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Queen. What on earth is this doing here? Well, they know all about it in Aurora, Illinois.

That scene from Wayne’s World – combined with strong recurrent play following Freddie Mercury’s death in November ’91 – sent “Bohemian Rhapsody” rocketing back up the charts the following spring. It zipped past its initial chart peak (#9 in the spring of 1976) and eventually achieved the highest placement for a re-release of a true “oldie” (i.e., a song more than a decade old) in Hot 100 history. Nowadays, thanks to a revision of Billboard’s chart rules, such a feat isn’t even possible; if it were, then early last month the entire Top 10 might have consisted of Michael Jackson songs.

9. (tie) “Lovefool,” the Cardigans; “I Believe I Can Fly,” R. Kelly; “Don’t Let Go (Love),” En Vogue; “One Headlight,” the Wallflowers. Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” didn’t achieve quite the same feat (for the purposes of this list) that Bryan Adams had, but it did fend off these four challengers during its 11-week reign in the winter of ’96-’97. And all four were pretty great; any one of them could have earned a place on this list on its own. Here’s the thing, though – only two of them actually reached #2 on the Hot 100. The other two, “Lovefool” and “One Headlight,” were never released as singles; each ascended to the #2 position on the Hot 100 Airplay chart (the former for eight weeks, the latter for five) but never qualified for inclusion on the big chart because Billboard’s rules at the time didn’t allow it. And here’s the other thing: The biggest hit of the winter of 1997 wasn’t really “Unbreak My Heart,” whose 11 weeks atop the Hot 100 were built on only two weeks atop the airplay chart, and one atop the sales chart. No, the most-heard song of the season was No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak,” which spent 16 weeks atop the airplay chart and became the second-biggest radio hit of all time. But “Don’t Speak” never appeared on the Hot 100, either, because a physical single was never released. (See my aforementioned column from last year for details of another, even bigger hit that suffered a similar fate.) If all this is so confusing that you’ve skipped to the bottom of the paragraph … well, that’s how screwed up the Billboard charts became during the ’90s.

8. “All I Wanna Do,” Sheryl Crow. Back in the days when we still published a “Chartburn” column around these parts, that panel of “experts” had a knock-down-drag-out over the merits of “All I Wanna Do.” I’m still a fan of it, I must say – its lyric, a poem by Wyn Cooper that Crow found in a used-book shop, is still a breath of fresh air after all these years. It went on to win the Record of the Year Grammy and launch Crow’s superstar career – even though the second-biggest Hot 100 hit of all time, Boyz II Men’s blecchy “I’ll Make Love to You” (14 weeks at #1), kept the sun from ever coming up over Santa Monica Boulevard during the fall of ’94. Sheryl and Eric — take us to the bridge!

7. “Tears in Heaven,” Eric Clapton. I’m not going to repeat the oft-told tale of 4-year-old Conor Clapton’s death, and the massive outpouring of sympathy that drove daddy Eric’s single up the charts during the spring of ’92 — and then, the following winter, steered Clapton onstage for approximately 87 Grammy-award acceptance speeches. By which point, after we’d all watched Clapton push his glasses up his nose a million times while he played “Tears in Heaven” and “Layla” on MTV Unplugged, we were all ready for Slowhand to pick up his electric guitar again. “Tears in Heaven” is still a great, heartbreaking song, of course. By the way, it was blocked from the top by Vanessa Williams’ “Save the Best for Last.” She has her own tales of heartbreak to tell, I’m sure. I’d like to hear them — the more detail the better, please.

6. “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It),” En Vogue. It was during my treatise on the #2s of the ’70s that I lamented the inability of a mature, brilliantly performed soul classic (“You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”) to surpass a substance-free turd like “Shake Your Booty” on the pop charts. Well, here we have a stone-cold brilliant single from the finest girl group of the ’90s (suck it, TLC and SWV and all other three-lettered wannabes) … and, wouldn’t you know, it was stomped by Kris Kross’s utterly inane “Jump” during the spring of 1992. Well, it’s nice to know that En Vogue got the last laugh – when was the last time you heard “Jump,” anyway? – because “My Lovin’” really had it goin’ on: fab vocals (of course), a happenin’ guitar riff lifted from James Brown’s “The Payback,” and a hot-hot-smokin’-hot video. Some people think the group’s follow-up clip, for “Giving Him Something He Can Feel,” is even hotter … but as far as I’m concerned the latter clip gives entirely too much camera time to the gawking dudes, rather than letting the rest of us gawk ourselves.

5. “You Were Meant for Me,” Jewel. Ms. Kilcher earns her lofty position on this list not because her song, released in November 1996, is a pop classic – in fact, every time I hear it I can’t believe it wasn’t laughed off the radio, with lyrics like “I got my eggs and my pancakes too / I got my maple syrup, everything but you.” No, Jewel is here because, by the time “You Were Meant for Me” finally dropped off the Hot 100 in April 1998, it ranked as the longest-running single in the chart’s history at 65 weeks. It was helped along by its B-side, “Foolish Games,” which became a Top 10 hit on its own and kept the single’s sales figures aloft for six additional months. To get an idea how bifurcated pop radio had become by the late ’90s, consider that “You Were Meant for Me” stalled at #2 behind Puff Daddy’s “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” and later moved back to that position for an additional week behind Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous “Hypnotize.” How many radio stations do you think were playing all three of those songs at the time?

4. “How Do I Live,” LeAnn Rimes. By the time Jewel finished her 15-month run on the Hot 100, the single that would break her longevity record was already on its own downward trajectory. Teen country chanteuse LeAnn Rimes, who at the time was hyped as the second coming of Patsy Cline, was commissioned to record Diane Warren’s sad-but-syrupy confection “How Do I Live” for producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s film Con Air. But once it was finished Bruckheimer rejected Rimes’ version as too immature and poppy, and not at all Cline-ish. He gave the job to Trisha Yearwood instead, and she turned in a far more nuanced rendition that would earn her a #1 country hit and a slew of awards. Rimes, however, was not to be denied, and so Curb Records released her version in direct competition with Yearwood’s – an occurrence that was common until the ’50s (five versions of “Melody of Love” charted simultaneously in 1955), but rarely seen since. Yearwood won the battle on the country charts, but Rimes swamped her on the Hot 100, spending four weeks at number two and dominating “mainstream” pop radio for nearly six months. Her failure to ascend to #1 can be laid, along with a bazillion bouquets of flowers, on the gravesite of Princess Diana; her death inspired Elton John to release the biggest-selling single in history, “Candle in the Wind 1997,” and that single’s performance at retail made Rimes’ chart-topping mission impossible. Still, “How Do I Live” remained on the Hot 100 for 69 weeks, smashing Jewel’s record by a full month. It finally dropped off the chart in October ’98, almost exactly 10 years before Jason Mraz’ single “I’m Yours” peaked at #6. The significance of that fact is that “I’m Yours” remains on the Hot 100 right now at #35, in its 68th week. If it lasts two more – and there’s no reason to doubt it will – it will render “How Do I Live” a historical footnote, chartwise. (Perhaps its chart run eventually will last as long as the live video below.) Oh, well, LeAnn – at least you’ve still got Eddie Cibrian (if US magazine is to be believed).

3. “Whoomp! There It Is,” Tag Team. Depending on where you lived and which subset of Top 40 radio you listened to, this was the song of the summer of 1993 … or, at least, its title was the phrase you couldn’t get out of your head. The story of “Whoomp!” is perhaps unparalleled in pop history. During the spring of 1993, two songs emerged from the deep South that were different in nearly every way, except for their shared chorus. The first one to chart, by the Miami-based crew 95 South, was titled “Whoot, There It Is” and eventually climbed to #11 on the Hot 100. A month after that song’s chart debut, along came the Atlanta-based Tag Team with “Whoomp! There It Is,” and “Whoomp!” really took off. It sold more than 4 million copies and topped Billboard’s singles sales chart for a whopping 16 weeks. Its failure to reach #1 on the Hot 100 is, again, indicative of the split at Top 40 radio by that time; “Whoomp!” never climbed higher than #9 on the airplay chart because many “Top 40 Mainstream” stations weren’t spinning it at all. As it was, “Whoomp!” cooled its heels for seven weeks at #2 on the big chart, stuck behind UB40’s abysmal reggaefication of Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” These days – apart from their continued prominence at sports arenas nationwide — both “Whoomp!” and “Whoot” are perhaps best remembered by pop linguists tracking the origins of the enduring catchphrase “Woot!” If you must, you can explore the bickering over the etymology of “Woot!” here.

2. “Missing,” Everything But the Girl. Who’da thunk, during all those years when Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt were playing navel-gazing ballads and smooth bossa nova without really denting the American consciousness, that all they needed to scale the heights of pop radio was one good dance mix? (Or, seemingly, twenty of them.) “Missing” started as a nice, midtempo track off the duo’s eighth studio album, Amplified Heart, during the fall of 1994. (Thorn later admitted that they had intended “Missing” to be a dance track in the first place, but wimped out and removed the house-music elements they’d recorded.) It wasn’t until nearly a year after the album’s release that Todd Terry’s remix broke out of dance clubs and onto pop radio – and it was seven months after that before “Missing” climbed to #2, where it was vanquished by the biggest hit in Hot 100 history. (That would be Mariah Carey & Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day,” which I honored last summer in this space with the title “Worst #1 Song of the ’90s.”) I never thought I’d see Tracey and a bevy of go-go dancers on the same stage, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Apologies to my colleague Jason Hare, and to fans everywhere of Popdose patron saint Michael McDonald, for my failure to include Warren G. and Nate Dogg’s “Regulate” on this list. I know I’m supposed to pay McD his props whenever possible, but what can I say? I keep forgettin’. Anyway, here are some of the decade’s other #2 hits, along with the songs that kept them from climbing One Step Closer to immortality. (sorry)

“Pump Up the Jam,” Technotronic (Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You”); “Cradle of Love,” Billy Idol, and “Power,” Snap! (Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love”); “I Wanna Sex You Up,” Color Me Badd (Extreme’s “More than Words”); “I Love Your Smile,” Shanice (Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy”); “Under the Bridge,” Red Hot Chili Peppers (Kris Kross’s “Jump”); “If I Ever Fall in Love,” Shai, and “Rumpshaker,” Wreckx n Effect (Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”); “Nothin’ But a G Thang,” Dr. Dre (Snow’s “Informer”); “All That She Wants,” Ace of Base (Meat Loaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love”).

Also, “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Nicki French (Bryan Adams’ “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman”); “Not Gon’ Cry,” Mary J. Blige, and “Sittin’ Up in My Room,” Brandy (Carey & Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day”); “Nobody Knows,” Tony Rich Project (Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me”); “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” Ms. Dion, and “I Love You Always Forever,” Donna Lewis (Los Del Rio’s “Macarena”); “Bitch,” Meredith Brooks (Puff Daddy & Faith Evans’s “I’ll Be Missing You”); “Walking on the Sun,” Smash Mouth (Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money Mo Problems”); “Frozen,” Madonna (K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life”); “You’re Still the One,” Shania Twain (Next’s “Too Close”); “Kiss Me,” Sixpence None the Richer (TLC’s “No Scrubs”); “Last Kiss,” Pearl Jam (Jennifer Lopez’s “If You Had My Love”); and “Back at One,” Brian McKnight (Santana’s “Smooth”).

I’ll be back soon to wrap up this series with a look at the Aughts – and to question how in the world classics like “Since U Been Gone,” “Crazy,” and … um … “Fergalicious” failed to reach the top.

That convergence of low cost and a sense of discovery – i.e., the willingness to take a chance on something new and unknown because the financial risk is relatively low – traditionally has been a big part of the lure for eMusic’s subscriber base. But that equation has changed over the last couple of weeks, as the site has significantly raised its subscription rates as part of the deal it recently struck with Sony Music Entertainment. The agreement is the first that eMusic has been able to reach with a major-label conglomerate, and on July 1 it resulted in a massive infusion of well-known music to the site’s catalog – just in time for subscribers to join the dogpile on Michael Jackson recordings, which quickly shot toward the top of the site’s download charts.

Those downloads, however, now come at 40 to 48 cents a (king of) pop, depending on the subscription, rather than the 25 to 35 cents they did just a month ago. (In order to soften the blow a bit, eMusic has instituted a new “album pricing” system that enables users to download some – but only some – full albums at rates cheaper than the site’s former track-by-track policy would have allowed.) This shift inspires a certain ambivalence; it’s nice, for example, to think that indie labels and their artists will receive higher royalties now, because what has traditionally been a “steal” for eMusic subscribers has also been something of a steal from those acts.

Still, for me, the pricing change threatens to transform my entire concept of eMusic and the way I use it. Traditionally I have been keen to troll the site for recommendations from other users who like some of the same music I like, and to take chances on artists I end up loving (the Guggenheim Grotto) as well as disliking (sorry, Julie Doiron). I have come to consider eMusic the perfect (that is, perfectly interactive and inexpensive) way to keep my tastes current and expanding, rather than calcifying.

But I’ve gotta say, the idea of paying $4.40 for that aforementioned Sarabeth Tucek album today is a lot less enticing than the $2.75 I paid for it last year. If I’ve got 100 downloads a month (and most eMusic subscribers buy far fewer tracks than I do), how many of them am I going to be willing to burn on artists I’ve never heard of – particularly when I now have the option of using those credits to complete my Springsteen or Leonard Cohen collections?

That’s a question I have not yet answered for myself. But while I’ve been thinking about it – and while I’ve been staring down the fresh 100 credits in my account – I asked eMusic CEO Danny Stein for some answers on the Sony deal and the site’s plans for dealing with malcontents like me who are afraid of having too many choices.

How did the negotiations with Sony proceed to the point of agreement? Was per-track pricing the major sticking point, and what other issues blocked a deal until recently?
We’ve been talking with Sony for a long time, since we bought the company in 2003. eMusic was one of the first sites to sell unencrypted MP3s, and the DRM-free format was an issue for all of the major labels until 2008. The next issue we had to agree on was pricing. The major labels continue to find new ways to grow their businesses, and eMusic has become a sizable retail account. We paid our independent labels more than $35 million in revenue in 2008.

What is the structure of the agreement? What limits has Sony placed on providing content to eMusic?
Our agreement with Sony Music Entertainment covers the entire back catalog from every Sony label. We will receive any Sony label record that is more than 24 months old. It is possible that we will begin selling music released inside the 24-month window from emerging artists that our customers may be interested in.

How does the agreement with Sony fit into eMusic’s original business model? I would guess that your editors & marketers have made choices over the years related to website features that were aimed specifically at pushing less well-known (and therefore harder-to-sell) indie acts; are there adjustments to be made when Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen are suddenly available?
Our goal has always been to offer our customers as much music as possible in a universally compatible format, at a great value and within some editorial context. Recognizing that customers wanted a quality user experience, independent labels were the first to be willing to experiment with DRM-free formats and pricing. eMusic’s editorial team has always highlighted the music we thought would appeal to our audience, and presented that music with as much context as possible. This goal doesn’t change with the addition of Sony. In fact, the addition of Sony allows us to use some of the better-known artists to shine a spotlight on the lesser-known artists, and provides an opportunity to explore some of the influences of today’s up-and-coming artists.

Regardless of your long-term plans for the site, over the years eMusic has developed the reputation as the place to find indie music on the web, and I assume that a large number of your subscribers have developed loyalties to the site based on that reputation. Do you sense a need to retain that type of indie-based loyalty, and what efforts are you planning to maintain that focus?
Independent music is an integral part of eMusic, and part of our DNA. We will always promote independent music to our customers over the commercial mainstream top 40 which dominates every other major music service. We’ll use some of the better-known artists to help expose independent artists. You can see those efforts in our new “Six Degrees” editorial feature, where we explore the similarities between six seemingly unconnected records.

How do you expect the infusion of major-label acts to alter eMusic’s charts, its “Dozens” features, and its interactive content (user lists, etc.)? So far, apart from the expected surge in Michael Jackson albums, the best-sellers chart does not seem to have been overrun by major-label content. What is your expectation for the future, in terms of sales of Sony catalog vs. the site’s traditional indie content?
So much of what sells on eMusic, as is the case everywhere, is new releases, so we’ll definitely see new indie releases continue to dominate the chart save for a few exceptions here and there. Editorially, we’re treating Sony as we treat any other label on the site – we’ll heavily feature the parts of their catalog that we think our users will prefer. To us, it makes just as much sense to do a feature on the Stone Roses or the London Suede as it does Sunset Rubdown.

How has your agreement with Sony affected your policies with indie labels and artists, in terms of royalty rates, marketing commitments, etc.? Has the response from key partners at indie labels been positive or negative, and what are their concerns?
The reaction from our independent labels has been very positive. Many labels have been asking us to raise prices for years. All our labels have to pay royalties to support their artists and their own costs, so this was a collaborative effort to build a business together that had long-term viability and still maintained our prices as being roughly 50 percent cheaper than iTunes and Amazon. By adding a greater selection of music to the site, we’ll attract more customers and ultimately expose their artists to a larger audience, which is good for everyone. Independent labels will benefit enormously from a larger, more successful eMusic, with more subscribers buying more music and increasing the royalty pool for everyone.

How did you arrive at your new pricing structure? What comments have you heard from longtime subscribers about it? Do you expect a short-term drop in subscribers who cannot or will not pay the new fees?
We’ve been listening to our customers about pricing, and we appreciate that people have such a strong connection to eMusic and are as passionate about it as we are. The price change is a necessary move for us to get to where we want to be as a business. We haven’t yet seen a rise in subscription cancellations due to the new price plans. This is something we’re monitoring very closely.

How does the influx of Sony content enable you to market the site in new ways, or in new places? Alternatively, is there any expectation that the addition of major-label content will make eMusic LESS appealing to certain markets or constituencies, simply because of its impact on the site’s “hipness” factor?
The addition of music from Sony artists certainly broadens our appeal and makes us a more attractive partner for some of the companies we have marketing agreements with, such as SanDisk, Toshiba and Netflix. And we believe that this broadening will allow us to more aggressively feature lesser-known artists that don’t get a lot of exposure elsewhere.

Having Sony music will not change the eMusic sensibility. We think most of our existing subscribers enjoy a wide variety of music and will appreciate the chance to get this catalogue at lower prices than other stores. We hope they will all stick with us and see what we do with the Sony catalogue and other labels we may be able to offer in the future.

Is there any concern that, with only one major conglomerate on board, eMusic may come to be seen as an online version of the old Columbia or RCA record clubs? In other words, can the site (for marketing purposes) afford for very long to treat the addition of the Sony catalog as an achievement in itself — or does it make it necessary, in the near term, to redouble your efforts to get other majors on board, lest eMusic come to be seen by newcomers as an arm of Sony?
We are in active conversations with the other major labels and hope to offer our customers as much music as possible in the future. Our customers will never have to worry about eMusic becoming an arm of Sony Music Entertainment, as we singularly run eMusic for our members. We hope to one day carry all the music in the world, but to merchandise this music through the eMusic lens. That’s what makes us different.

I have declined to babble about the moments when Michael’s music provided my life’s soundtrack – how the J5’s Greatest Hits was the first album I ever owned as a 5-year-old; how my friends and I cruised my hometown debating whether the best part of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” was the “Mama say, mama sa, mama coo sa” part or the “Yee hahs!”; how the entire world (including even my cloistered grad-school community) paused to take in the premiere of the “Black or White” video and then burned up the phone lines asking each other, “What the fuck was that last part?”

I have stifled the urge to pontificate on how the world leapt right past forgiveness to forgetfulness last month, or how the family trotted out and exploited Michael’s long-sheltered children to help ensure that his extramusical legacy wouldn’t (exclusively) involve images of surgical masks, hyperbaric chambers, court appearances, Emmanuel Lewis and Bubbles. And I’ve remained quiet as, in the weeks since the memorial service, we have so quickly and efficiently stuffed MJ into Elvis’ (metaphorical) box. To wit: Elvis was a hugely influential pop progenitor and oft-described King who died bloated, sequined and strung out on prescription medication. Michael was a hugely influential, sequined crossover-pop progenitor and self-described King who died emaciated, caucasian … and strung out on prescription medication.

But last week, as we passed the one-month mark since Michael became omnipresent once more, I finally figured out what I’d like to say to him as he passes into legend. It’s this: Thanks for destroying the record industry!

OK, maybe that’s a stretch, but hear me out anyway. We all know that Michael sold a lot of copies of Thriller – somewhere between 25 million and 7 billion worldwide, depending on who’s doing the counting (as my colleague Ann Logue documented last week). In the process, he changed a pop landscape that had become almost lily-white for a couple years following disco’s decline. He broke down the racial barriers at MTV with the video for “Beat It,” a song that bridged the gulf between R&B and rock ’n’ roll via Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo. Over the next year he would rack up an unprecedented seven top-10 pop hits from a single album, invent the moonwalk and the dancing zombie, and remind us that Vincent Price was (for the time being) still alive.

That’s all well and good. No one can deny the significance of those achievements, and nobody argues the merits of the music on Thriller. But while it hardly invented the blockbuster album as an event – Frampton Comes Alive, Rumours and Saturday Night Fever all preceded it – Thriller did create a monster: the blockbuster as a goal, as an expectation even. Michael obviously let those sales figures and pop-radio hits go to his head – as did Epic Records, and as did (eventually) all the major labels. Commercial considerations, rather than artistic ones, came to dominate MJ’s “creative” life, beginning with the Bad album and continuing (with ever-diminishing returns) the rest of his career. And the lengths to which he and his corporate enablers went to break more sales records and attain greater ubiquity became – despite those diminishing returns – the template for a major-label trend toward de-emphasizing artist development and lesser-selling genres in their zealous pursuit of blockbuster hits.

As the tsunami of hype surrounding the release of Bad crested in mid-1987, Epic execs spoke with apparent seriousness about releasing every one of its 11 tracks as singles. (Mercifully, they would quit at seven, though two others spawned videos.) The album itself seemed calculated not so much to expand Michael’s artistry, but to replicate and/or reference past achievements. There was the gloppy duet for a first single (“I Just Can’t Stop Loving You”), the plot-enhanced video helmed by a major film director (Scorsese’s “Bad”), the incestuous offspring of “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” (“Dirty Diana,” featuring Steve Stevens on guitar), and the first of what would become several attempts to revisit “We Are the World” (“Man in the Mirror”). I’m not saying there’s nothing of quality on Bad – “Man in the Mirror” and “The Way You Make Me Feel” (the song, not the so-disturbing-it’s-hilarious video) are pretty wonderful, and “Smooth Criminal” has a great groove – but, honestly, is anything on the album as memorable as this?

Of course, inspiring a classic “Weird Al” parody (or two) is an achievement in its own right, but it’s also symptomatic of the overexposure that turned Michael’s crossover dream into a nightmare. It stemmed, in part, from his determination to be all things to all people – a pop star and a soul man, a lover and a fighter (to twist a misbegotten lyrical aside), a “Bad”ass and a Disneyland attraction … black and white. His videos reflected the diversity of the audience he demanded. Just think of those videos, from “Beat It” through “Remember the Time”: casts of dozens (if not thousands), representing every conceivable race and ethnicity. It became the default crossover-video meme: Surround your black face with multitudes of nonblack ones in a cozy, can’t-we-all-get-along environment. (Consider also Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long,” “Hello” and … ugh … “Dancing on the Ceiling” – Lionel’s own crossover journey paralleled Michael’s in its compulsiveness – as well as Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” numerous Janet Jackson clips, and the impossibly multicultural audience shots throughout Purple Rain.) Michael’s “Black or White” video obviously was the culmination of all this; heck, its pandering smorgasbord of ethnicities inspired a key section of my Master’s thesis, which was titled (I shit you not) “Paint It Black: The Visual Conventions of African-American Music Videos.”

“All things to all people,” however, was not just how Michael wanted others to see him – it’s clearly how he saw himself. The overwhelming success of Thriller seemed to spawn in him a neurotic obsession with being the Biggest Pop Star Ever … the King of Pop, if you will (and he did). And so, even as his sales figures (not to mention his creative mojo) dwindled album by album, he and his marketers at Epic (eventually owned by Sony) dreamed up a succession of gimmicks to prop up his numbers and allow him to claim new achievements. Sales of Dangerous sagging too quickly? Let’s place “Will You Be There” (incongruously) in a kids’ movie about a whale! “Scream” failed to reach #1, even with sis’s help? Let’s flood the market with half-price singles so you can score the first-ever (and perhaps worst-ever) hit to debut at the top, “You Are Not Alone”! He seemed to pursue honorary awards and made-up distinctions – a Grammy “Living Legend” award, even a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records (one of many he would “earn”) as the entertainer supporting the highest number of charities (39). The most bizarre such incident came, famously, at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards, when he mistook Britney Spears’ birthday-wish babbling for an “Artist of the Millennium” award.

It was sad (though, let’s admit it, also funny) enough to watch Michael grasp at such straws, even with everything else he was going (and putting himself) through. But it’s been difficult, and often infuriating, to watch the increasingly conglomerated major labels take cues from his antics as they transformed themselves into smash-hit-or-bust box-office junkies. Even as they released fewer and fewer singles through the ’90s, concerned that new (and pricey) CD singles were “cannibalizing” the album market, they also followed Sony’s lead and cooked up #1 debuts by their established artists via temporary discounts. (The artists who benefited from these shenanigans were, not coincidentally, fellow crossover acts: Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Boyz II Men.) The competition for album-chart placements became overheated as well, with marketing departments bending over backward (and manipulating release dates) to score the #1 debuts made possible by Billboard’s implementation of SoundScan sales-tracking technology.

Michael himself had, beginning with the Dangerous album, chosen to offset his own creative decline by working with the then-burgeoning crop of pop/R&B writer-producers. By the end of the ’90s, such puppetmasters (Kelly, Teddy Riley, Rodney Jerkins, Max Martin, etc.) ruled the U.S. pop scene almost completely, working their magic with substance-deprived (though clearly MJ-influenced) acts like Britney and Xtina and J. Lo, the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, Brandy and Monica … and, later, the full range of Disney-approved starlets. It is clearly an unfair overstatement to claim that, as a result of all this, real musical talents have lately been relegated to the indie-music ghetto while major-label A&R now takes place at shopping malls and theme parks, rather than smoky bars and street corners … but it certainly feels true, doesn’t it?

Look, I’m not saying that MJ is solely responsible for the state of the music business as we know it. Certainly there are plenty of other factors that have contributed: the bottom-line obsessiveness that has come with conglomeration; the chart manipulations that have become possible with new technologies for tracking sales and airplay; the crippling effects of the Napster free-for-all and the uncertainties of the online future. But the Thriller cash cow indubitably went a long way toward putting those dollar signs in the eyes of Sony, Seagram and other multinationals in the first place. And Michael’s own fixation with commercial dominance engendered marketing tricks and dicey claims of achievement, the likes of which have become standard operating procedure at the major labels.

Just as the major movie studios largely have abandoned “art” in favor of the type of popcorn fare that can compete for the top of the box-office charts and impress corporate shareholders, so did the major music labels largely turn themselves into routinized hitmaking machines — matching voices and images with behind-the-scenes magicians who produce R&B-tinged pop songs and rap albums that predictably debut atop the charts, then quickly make way for the next flavor of the moment. Michael Jackson created a lot of great work and entertained untold (though oft-counted) millions during the middle 30 of his 50 years; he also, through a combination of happenstance, ambition and megalomania, helped create the lust for blockbuster sales that today dominates the shrinking multinational music business. He’s gone now, but he’s left us to keep living with that part of his legacy, along with the rest of it.

Welcome to the ramshackle, utterly charming onstage world of Holsapple & Stamey, circa 2009. Their place in the pantheon long since secure, the two indie-rock progenitors (once and, apparently, future co-leaders of the dB’s) are back on the road with nothing to prove, but a new set of amiable songs to work into the repertoire. They recently released their second album as a duo, Here and Now, on the Bar/None label; it comes a mere 17 years after they flew in the face of grunge with their beloved, stripped-down Mavericks LP. Yes, they were mavericks when mavericks were cool (before a certain Alaskan claimed the mantle) – but now they’re content to pretend, as they do on the new album’s title track, that their greatest ambition is to avoid screwing up: “If there ever was a show/We could not afford to blow to bits/We could always hire some counterfeits/To do that show.”

“Here and Now” serves as the perfect introduction to Holsapple & Stamey’s lighthearted, self-effacing duo aesthetic; indeed, if there were a market for a sitcom featuring a pair of aging rockers good-naturedly barnstorming the land – a gender-redefined, hipster Golden Girls, if you will – then “Here and Now” would be its theme song. It led off the McCabe’s concert, which also featured sterling (if shambolic) renditions of album cuts “Santa Monica,” “Early in the Morning” and “Widescreen World.” Stamey also sang Big Star alum Chris Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos,” and the duo covered Family’s prog-rock fave “My Friend the Sun,” which opens the Here and Now album.

“Our label tells us that if we sell enough copies of the new album on CD, they’ll release it on vinyl!” Holsapple enthused at one point Friday night. Holsapple & Stamey have been around long enough to see traditions like album-release orders turned on their heads; thankfully, as they’ve proved on this mini-tour, other traditions – like the sound of two friends harmonizing around a condenser mic – can always pick up exactly where they left off.

Stamey chatted with Popdose via e-mail a couple weeks ago. Here are the highlights:

You and Peter have been working on the duo album, and also on a new dB’s record, for awhile now. What made this spring the moment for the release of Here and Now?
I guess this was the record that was closest to being finished. And with Peter living just down the road from me now [in Durham, NC], it was easier. Will [Rigby] from the dB’s lives in Ohio, and Gene [Holder] in NYC.

How have you compartmentalized the types of songs you’re contributing and choosing for each album?
Peter and I have a sense of what fits into the duo-record vibe; it is, overall, a gentler and simpler kind of song. Even though Here and Now ended up with a lot of drums and bass, these songs are, at their core, guitar-strumming tunes that can be sung quietly. Once we hear Will drumming and Gene playing bass, different sounds seem to work for the dB’s. So yes, there was a lot of “that’s a dB’s … that’s a Peter & Chris.”

We also went through a bunch of demos with Scott Litt, who’s been producing some on the dB’s record, and he gave us his take on which fitted where. I think of our duo records as hearkening back to almost the ’50s and early ’60s – the Lovin’ Spoonful, Beach Boys kind of thing. I also think the duo thing is a kind of California band, in a weird way — we started it in L.A., when Peter was living there. I think of the dB’s as very much an NYC band; the shadow of CBGB’s and Maxwell’s is never far away. Although we are all from North Carolina, it was NYC that shaped that band.

What is the status of the dB’s album, and how is the dynamic amongst the group after all these years?
The dynamic between the band is about the same, I’d say, maybe more humorous. We all listen to each other and argue about musical points, and remain friends. The geography is just a lot more complicated.

Hurricane Katrina, which forced Peter to move from New Orleans back to North Carolina, obviously had an impact on the sessions and on the material for the new album. The song “Begin Again” reflects his response to watching the hurricane unfold.
Although you are correct in thinking this to some degree, it is actually Katrina as metaphor, as well. Most all these songs existed before Katrina, and there were upheavals in our lives before and after that awful event. And even “Begin Again” can be taken as fitting more recent life-changing events. There will always be times of chaos let loose in the world. The Katrina angle on our record is a red herring, between you and me.

Given your history of experiments with improvisation, did you do any serious jamming with Branford Marsalis during his sessions for “Early in the Morning” and “Begin Again”?
We did a lot of talking; the playing itself was quick. He was overdubbing, and pretty much nailed it in a few takes. I’ve recorded him since, in a jazz context, and he’s been equally efficient. He has a great ability to burn brightly and then move on.

You’ve been recording in such a variety of contexts over the past several years, after recording only sporadically during the 15 years or so before that. Which projects have you found particularly satisfying, and what positives do you take out of the various settings in which you’ve been making music?
The difficult thing about recording a lot is that you start to have a voice that says, “Oh, yeah, guitar through a Leslie, I’ve done that before” — whereas, actually, every day is different and new. You have to find your beginner’s mind amidst all of history’s echoes. As far as a timeline, I’ve been working maybe 200 days a year in studios, on average, for most of my adult life; for the last decade it’s been more like 300 days a year. It’s just that I haven’t been the artist (with the name on the front) on many of these records, but they all have been creative endeavors. The most satisfying ones? They come when, seemingly out of nowhere, a great performance or a new song swirls up from the ether.

Most of the people I talk to about your earlier solo work prefer the Fireworks album, but I have a strong preference for It’s Alright — which I had a heck of a time tracking down on CD a few years ago. What’s your attitude toward these albums … and toward A&M?
I like the songs on Fireworks, but the performances are probably a bit better overall on It’s Alright. Both these records, to my ear, have the drums up too loud–but that was the era. The songs are sunnier on Fireworks, but the sound is sunnier on It’s Alright – maybe that’s a good way to look at it. I wish “27 Years” and “The Seduction” had a bit better mix, I guess. I’d tend to go more song-by-song in rating the percentage with which each song was successfully realized.

Being on A&M with Karen Glauber and David Anderle at the helm was great fun, and an honor as well –although it was also a shock to my indie system. I was mostly interested in using the major-label clout to put together a tour of high schools where resident marching bands would play my songs and I’d sing them — see “Incredible Happiness” for a clue to how this might sound — and when I realized the marching band thing didn’t seem to them to be a good way to sell records, I guess I felt a bit let down.

A couple questions from my Popdose colleagues: Do you still have any spare copies of Chris Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos” single lying around? How did he find his way to [Stamey's label] Car Records, anyway?
I do have some copies of Bell’s 45 — not that many, though. Alex Chilton told me about that record and asked me to consider releasing it. In classic Jimmy Iovine fashion, Chris played it for me over the phone and I flipped for it. Although I asked him to speed it up a bit in mastering – again, typical A&R thinking, I guess! He wanted “Fight at the Table” as a B-side, but I argued for “You and Your Sister.”

Speaking of former Big Star members, you’re credited with playing maracas on Alex Chilton’s “Bach’s Bottom.” Had you ever picked up a maraca prior to those sessions?
Alex, Lloyd Fonoroff, and I cut a speedy, frentic version of that song one afternoon at Kurt Munkasi’s studio. The next day we scrapped it as too typical, and Alex recut it, playing all the parts himself — except for the maracas idea I had. Then we redid the end of it when it turned out the geography was off, as I recall. To this day I add shakers and maracas to mixes; they are like adding a bit of salt — thus the derivation of “salt shaker,” I think.

You appeared on the Golden Palominos’ album Visions of Excess. Were you fortunate enough to turn up on the days that either John Lydon or Richard Thompson were around? And is Syd Straw as much of a trip to work with as she is in interviews?
Anton [Fier] went to London to record Richard, and I didn’t go to the Rotten session. Syd has the gift of gab, for sure. At one point she was up for the job that went to Conan, I think, or maybe it was another late-night show. All of the Golden Palominos were classic characters, in retrospect, except perhaps for me, Lisa Herman, and Michael Stipe — we were the boring ones with the cameras.

With soundtracks having long since proven their value both as keepsakes of, and more recently as advertisements for, films both cherished and forgotten, it’s surprising when a movie that prominently features music fails to produce an aural as well as a visual document. I was reminded of this last week during a brief bombardment of Jeff Goldblum appearances — first live (well, taped) and in person on The Colbert Report, comically taking President Obama to task for his callous extermination of one of Goldblum’s musca domestica brethren …

… and then as a non sequitur in Robert Cass’s hallucinatory introduction to Friday’s Bootleg City column. For my own media-addled brain, any Goldblum reference immediately brings to mind my favorite of his movies, the mostly forgotten but genuinely delightful trifle The Tall Guy, from 1989. It was the first film written by Richard Curtis, who was already a legend of British television for his authorship of the Blackadder series and Not the Nine O’Clock News, and who would go on to write a series of veddy British rom-coms with steadily diminishing returns, from Four Weddings and a Funeral (yay!) to Notting Hill (bleah) to Love, Actually (ugh!).

The Tall Guy stars Goldblum as an awkward American actor spinning his wheels as the West End straight man for a mean-spirited, wildly popular funnyman (Rowan Atkinson). Inspired by his quirky romance with a way-too-sensible nurse (Emma Thompson, in her first major film role), he abandons his meal ticket and takes the lead in a wacked-out musical based on The Elephant Man.

The film is blissfully free of trademark Curtis dialogue clunkers like “Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed” and “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.” Instead, its centerpiece — apart from perhaps the silliest sex scene in modern film history — is a montage of highlights from the aforementioned musical within the film, Elephant! Here’s a snippet of the opening number:

And here’s the closing number:

In between, the musical’s Andrew Lloyd Webber parody features a wrenching ballad titled “Looks Like He’ll Be Packing His Trunk.” It’s all brilliantly rendered, knee-slapping stuff, which makes it all the more peculiar that The Tall Guy never spawned a soundtrack album. It’s really too bad, especially considering that the film gave new life to Madness’s early-’80s rendition of “It Must Be Love.”

Most likely, no soundtrack was released for The Tall Guy because the film never made much of an impact at the U.S. box office (it debuted here almost 18 months after opening in the UK). Such wasn’t exactly the case with another film whose songs never saw release, Tim Robbins’s political satire Bob Roberts. Released in 1992, but based on a character Robbins had created for a Saturday Night Live short in ‘86, the film portrayed a right-wing folksinger-millionaire’s quest for a U.S. Senate seat representing Pennsylvania. Roberts’s fictional campaign rally/concerts feature a style of politicking and attract an assortment of angry white supporters that eerily presaged the real-life Republican National Convention of ’92 — the film opened just a few weeks afterward — and the congressional campaigns of two years later.

Robbins famously refused to release a soundtrack for Bob Roberts, worried that actual right-wing politicians or activists might use his satirical songs for their own purposes. I always thought this reasoning was ridiculously flawed, for a couple of reasons: First, what was to stop any listener who chose to do so from transcribing and then replicating Robbins’s performances, with or without a CD from which to copy them? And second, even if he had released a soundtrack album, his liberal politics were well enough known that Republicans were hardly likely to try to exploit his performances.

Besides, who couldn’t have foretold in 1992 that someday every American would be able to watch this on his computer with the click of a button?

Or this?

And somebody must have given permission for postpunk band the Vandals to record “Complain” for their 1999 album The Vandals Play Really Bad Original Country Tunes….

Going off on a bit of a tangent, I’d like to finish this column by whining about a film from the same time period that was accompanied by a soundtrack — one that’s still available, albeit used — yet has never been released on DVD in this country: the British comic romance Hear My Song, from 1991. The directing debut of Peter Chelsom (whose most recent credit is another musical comedy — The Hannah Montana Movie), Hear My Song is the tale of a Liverpool nightclub impresario (Adrian Dunbar) who’s kept himself afloat by conning customers into paying to hear impersonators like Franc Cinatra, but who makes a last-ditch effort to save his club and impress his girl (Tara Fitzgerald) by talking the great Irish tenor Josef Locke (Ned Beatty) out of his self-imposed tax exile for one more gig.

The film is based on the true story of Locke, who fled England for Ireland in the late ’50s at the height of his career to escape the taxman. Beatty doesn’t appear until halfway through the film, but he leaves an indelible impression as a schlumpy guy who’s a ladykiller nonetheless because of the dulcet tones that emerge from his purty mouth. His voice comes as a revelation the first time we hear it …

… and triumphs through the seeming adversity of the film’s climax:

Word on the street is that Hear My Song will finally receive a DVD release – in the UK — late next month. Can a U.S. release be far behind? And if not, then why the hell not?

Josef Locke – Hear My Song, Violetta
Josef Locke – I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen

I’m embarrassed to say I was able to sit down at my laptop and reel off the names of about three dozen #2 hits from the grand and glorious ’80s without even cracking open my ever-present Joel Whitburn or Fred Bronson singles bibles. (The fact that I could do that, but can’t tie a Windsor knot, may explain why my career on Wall Street never took off. It also made narrowing down to 10 songs for this list a painful experience.) But it’s one thing to keep song titles and chart placements in your memory; it’s another to marvel at the tricks of fate, poor taste, or record-biz manipulation that launch one single over another on the way to Top 40 glory. Take this first juxtaposition, for example:

11. “Hazy Shade of Winter,” the Bangles. Here’s the hit that slaps some sense into those who mistake the Bangles for a novelty act, or stubbornly cling to the notion that Susanna, Vicki, Debbi and Michael didn’t really rock. They took a 20-year-old, twee-as-all-get-out Simon & Garfunkel tune and turned it into a fuzz-guitar anthem of ’80s excess, the perfect theme for what should have been a much better movie based on Bret Easton Ellis’ Hollywood-druggies novel Less than Zero. (Funny how the movie biz managed to mangle both Ellis’ book and Jay McInerney’s New York equivalent, Bright Lights, Big City. Of course, casting pretty boys Andrew McCarthy and Michael J. Fox as jaded protagonists didn’t help.) Anyway, how were the Bangles rewarded for their maturity and brilliance in transforming “Hazy Shade of Winter”? They were left in the dust by the god-awful ballad “Could’ve Been,” which might have been less terrible had it not been butchered by that caterwauling, flavor-of-the-month, shopping-mall princess Tiffany. A slightly interesting fact about “Could’ve Been”: Its composer, Lois Blaisch, was “discovered” while singing for her supper at a recently-shuttered restaurant a few miles from my house, called the Hungry Hunter. I knew there had to be a reason why I never considered going into that place … besides, of course, the goofiness of its name, particularly considering that it sat in the middle of a SoCal strip mall…

10. “Open Arms,” Journey. Now, I’m no great fan of “Open Arms” – but this was Journey’s only whiff of the #1 slot, so attention must be paid. It sat for six weeks at #2 during the winter of ’82, behind “Centerfold” and “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.” These days it’s remembered as the quintessential power ballad – it was awarded such status on one of those mind-numbing VH1 specials several years ago – even though it was neither the first nor the biggest such hit (“Keep on Loving You” bested its chart peak, and “The Best of Times” preceded it, among others). I always love a good yarn about a rock band’s ambivalence to the treacly ballad that earned it a bazillion smackeroos, so here goes: Jonathan Cain started “Open Arms” while still with the Babys, but John Waite (that paragon of rock-star integrity) called it “sentimental rubbish.” Cain moved to Journey and completed the song with Steve Perry, and they recorded it over the objections of Neal Schon, who compared it to Mary Poppins. If this story reminds you of a certain classic Behind the Music episode, in which one co-leader of an ’80s rock band recounted his dismay at being forced to play the pretentious schlock foisted upon him by the group’s other co-leader, you’re not alone. And you won’t need me to point out the irony in the fact that, on a number of those evil various-artists compilations of classic-rock remakes that seemingly were created to trick eMusic subscribers out of precious downloads, Tommy Shaw can be heard singing an insipid version of “Open Arms.”

9. “Dancing in the Dark,” Bruce Springsteen. The closest Springsteen ever got to scaling the singles chart was this song written with the express purpose of … scaling the singles chart. Acquiescing to Jon Landau’s demand for a sure-fire hit to lead off Born in the USA may not have been Bruce’s ballsiest moment, but he managed to turn that shitty suggestion into the shinola of “Dancing in the Dark,” which was a joy to hear on the radio throughout one of pop music’s very finest summers. (The absurdly high quality of that Summer of ’84 is reflected by the two songs that kept the Boss from being promoted to #1: Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” and Prince’s “When Doves Cry.”) Bruce’s chart ascent was aided by his first-ever dance remix, and by the small matter of that video. I’d hate to imagine how slowly the last quarter-century might have unfolded if not for the perpetual delight of Courteney Cox Arquette … My favorite bit of Courteney trivia: She was the first person ever to use the word “period” on American television in reference to menstruation. Thank you, Tampax! Anyway, in honor of Prince trumping Bruce on both the singles and albums charts during the summer of ’84…

8. “U Got the Look,” Prince. No need to feel too bad for Prince failing to top the chart this time – after all, this is the guy who got a Number One single out of “Batdance”! – but this song gets a mention here just because it’s so flippin’ wonderful. The nasty guitar solos … Sheena Easton getting her freak on … the knee-slapping video … boy versus girl in the World Series of Love … slammin’! (Of course, you only get to re-live the video in your head, because the no-longer-sexy MF is hellbent on removing all traces of himself from the internet.) Let’s pause for a moment to marvel at the second verse, in its entirety: “U got the look / U musta took / A whole hour just to make up your face, baby / Closing time, ugly lights, everybody’s inspected / But you are a natural beauty, unaffected / Did I say an hour? My face is red / I stand corrected.” This song should be the national anthem.

7. “Gloria,” Laura Branigan. I could never figure out how to categorize this hit — it was too late to be disco, too mainstream-American to qualify as synth-pop. Actually, though, “Gloria” originated as an Italian hit for its composer, Umberto Tozzi, in 1979 … which means it could easily be characterized as both disco and synth-pop. Whatever: It’s awesome, and was easily the best pop hit of 1982. It also played a role in a couple of pop-chart quirks during its tenure on radio that fall. (I’m gonna start apeing Fred Bronson’s Chartbeat column in Billboard now, so watch out.) First of all, on the chart dated December 11, the top four songs all had one-word titles – the first time that had ever happened. (Those titles were “Mickey,” “Gloria,” “Maneater,” and “Truly.” Of course, you won’t find the word “maneater” in a dictionary – which means that the chart of March 24, 2001 deserves special mention, since its top four titles were actual words: “Butterfly,” “Angel,” “Stutter” and “Again.”) My other trivial offering is this: While not that many songs named for specific individuals have topped the charts – indeed, not a single one did so during the 1990s – when they have, they’ve tended to do it in clumps. The one-two punch of “Mickey” and “Gloria” on the charts in ’82 was the first time it had happened since “Sherry” and “Sheila” double-dated 20 years earlier. Prior to that, though, it was relatively common for a few years: “Tammy/“Diana,” “Mack the Knife”/“Mr. Blue” … and then there was the chart of March 9, 1959, which featured a top four of “Venus,” “Charlie Brown,” “Stagger Lee,” and “Donna.”

6. “Start Me Up,” the Rolling Stones. This was, realistically speaking, the Stones’ last shot at attaining one more #1 single to go with the five they earned during the ’60s and the three they added in the ’70s. Whether “Start Me Up” qualifies as their last great single depends largely upon how you feel about “Undercover of the Night” and, to a lesser extent, “Mixed Emotions.” It did, however, offer Mick one more great cock-rock moment before he turned 40 – though radio preferred Christopher Cross’ flaccid “Arthur’s Theme,” and then allowed Hall & Oates’ inexplicable smash “Private Eyes” to leap over “Start Me Up” and end the latter song’s chances. (Honestly, has there ever been a more egregious example of career momentum powering a bad single to the top of the charts than “Private Eyes”?) Anyway, in case you’ve never considered the lyrical sauciness of “Start Me Up,” check out this bluegrass cover by the legendary Folksmen, from the A Mighty Wind soundtrack.

5. “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” Def Leppard. Like “Dancing in the Dark” above, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” was an afterthought during the recording of Def Leppard’s Hysteria album. It was written and recorded at the last minute, after producer Mutt Lange had cast about for a song that would get the band to the top of the singles chart. Oddly, then, the band and their label took their sweet time laying the groundwork for their can’t-miss single; they released three other tracks before it. Which begs the question, in what universe was Mercury Records dwelling when it considered “Women,” or “Animal,” or “Hysteria” more appropriate single choices than “Pour Some Sugar on Me”? I suppose the label’s exercise in momentum-building paid off in the end; “Pour Some Sugar” was unquestionably the radio hit of the summer of ’88, and it finally drove the Hysteria album to #1 a year after its release — though the single somehow failed to smite wimpy ol’ Richard Marx’s interminable ballad “Hold On to the Nights” on the Hot 100. “Hold On to the Nights,” like “Pour Some Sugar,” was the fourth single released from a hit album — in this case, Marx’s eponymous debut. It was all part of an evil trend, which peaked about this time, that stratified pop radio through the release of endless singles from superstar artists’ albums. Among albums contemporaneous with Hysteria, Michael Jackson scored six Top 10s off Bad, George Michael had six off Faith, Whitney Houston had five off Whitney, and the Defs, Marx, INXS, Debbie Gibson and Expose (!) each had four. By the way, Def Leppard went on to release a fifth single off Hysteria – and, sure enough, finally scored a #1 hit … with an insipid ballad of its own, “Love Bites.”

4. “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” Crowded House. It’s quite possible that Neil Finn gets more love from the Popdose crew (as measured by the word) than any other artist, so I’ll be brief. In the alternate universe in which I dwell, “Don’t Dream It’s Over” (#20 on the Popdose 100) was merely the first shot in an astounding run of radio-dominating hits by Finn and his mates. Apart from a brief bout of backlash in 1991-92, when the band achieved Bee Gees-level overexposure (what could they expect, when the entire Top 5 consisted of singles from Woodface?), Crowded House has enjoyed uninterrupted, universal adulation for nearly a quarter-century now … and Paul Hester is still alive. (A fella can dream, can’t he?)

3. “Waiting for a Girl like You,” Foreigner. As documented last year in my treatise on the Worst #1 Songs of the ’80s, this single ties with Missy Elliott’s “Work It” as the longest-running #2 hit of all time, having spent an astounding 10 weeks there in late 1981. Unfortunately, it spent nine of those weeks waiting for one girl, in particular, to go away: Olivia Newton-John. ONJ simply refused to give up the treadmill with her atrocious smash “Physical” throughout the holiday season, so Foreigner chose to bide their time on the stationary bike – how far can I overextend this metaphor? – only to watch Hall & Oates run off with the #1 slot in late January with “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do).” Nevertheless, “Waiting for a Girl Like You” has outlasted those other hits — even Paul Anka thinks so! Despite its failure to reach the top, the song ranked as Billboard’s 80th-biggest hit of the Hot 100 era a couple years back. Oddly enough, there were several #2 hits ahead of it on that list, for reasons we’ll discuss in the next installment of this series. But first…

Watch Madonna – Material Girl in Music |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

2. (tie) “Material Girl” and “Express Yourself,” Madonna. Why, you may ask yourself, is Madonna here? Hasn’t she achieved enough, with her 12 Number One singles and whatnot? Don’t we read, and see, and hear enough about her already, without having her shoved in our faces in this context as well? I hear your complaints, and I would sympathize with them … but for two facts. The first is that, in addition to her other accomplishments, Madonna is one of the most prolific artists in history when it comes to falling just shy of the top of the charts; she has six #2 singles to date. More important, these two songs in particular are among the most iconic of her career – indeed, if historians were required to choose two Madonna hits to place in the time capsule, these might very well be the ones. She got her nickname from one of them, for crying out loud! And the other is a stone-cold girl-power classic, as documented here just a few weeks ago. In other words, when the history of the ’80s is written – not to mention the history of post-feminism, including Madonna’s shifting stature as an embodiment of materialism, cultural button-pushing and pop activism – “Material Girl” and “Express Yourself” are going to remain essential documents. (Besides, “Express Yourself” was kept out of the #1 slot by Martika’s “Toy Soldiers”! How the hell did that happen?)

As always, we close with a chronological list of some of the decade’s other kick-ass #2 hits, along with the songs that kept them from reaching the top: “Working My Way Back to You/Forgive Me Girl,” the Spinners (Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”); “Woman,” John Lennon (REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Loving You” and Blondie’s “Rapture”); “Just the Two of Us,” Grover Washington Jr. (Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train” and Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes”); “Being with You,” Smokey Robinson (also “Bette Davis Eyes”); “We Got the Beat,” the Go-Go’s (“I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”); “Rosanna,” Toto (the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”); “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” Culture Club (Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”); “Electric Avenue,” Eddy Grant (Irene Cara’s “Flashdance What a Feeling” and the Police’s “Every Breath You Take”); “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Cyndi Lauper, and “99 Luftballons,” Nena (Van Halen’s “Jump”); “Purple Rain,” Prince (Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”); “Easy Lover,” Philip Bailey & Phil Collins (Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”).

Also, “Manic Monday,” the Bangles (Prince’s “Kiss”); “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” Wang Chung, and “Notorious,” Duran Duran (the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian”); “C’est la Vie,” Robbie Nevil (Gregory Abbott’s “Shake You Down” and Billy & the Beaters’ “At This Moment”); “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” the Georgia Satellites (Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”); “I Want Your Sex,” George Michael (U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”); “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”, the Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield (Expose’s “Seasons Change” and Michael’s “Father Figure”); “I Don’t Want to Go On with You Like That,” Elton John (Michael’s “Monkey”); “Simply Irresistible,” Robert Palmer (Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine”); “Girl You Know It’s True,” Milli Vanilli (the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame”); “Soldier of Love,” Donny Osmond (Michael Damian’s “Rock On”); and “Love Song,” the Cure, and “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” Tears for Fears (Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much”).

Next up: the ’90s, and a couple dozen songs that couldn’t reach #1 because of Mariah Carey and/or Boyz II Men. (And Bryan Adams, for whom Canada still hasn’t officially apologized.)